


Surface

by narsus



Category: BioShock, Cabin Pressure
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Dark, Drug Addiction, Dubious Consent, F/M, Genetic Engineering, M/M, Minor Character Death, Moral Ambiguity, Physical Deformity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-05
Updated: 2012-04-15
Packaged: 2017-11-03 01:46:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/375718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narsus/pseuds/narsus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fifty years after the fall of Rapture life carries on for four escapees on the surface.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Splicer

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: Cabin Pressure belongs to John Finnemore and BBC Radio 4. Bioshock belongs to 2K Games and others.

The bright blue of sunlit skies terrifies him, enthrals him, threatens to swallow him whole. He can stand and stare up into the relentless blue for hours at that time, losing himself completely in its sheer _emptiness_. It is horrifying. Like a Venus Flytrap trying to draw him in. Yet he can’t stop staring. Frozen in a morbid fascination at such nothingness. The daylight skies are too bright, too sharp. They resemble nothing so much as the pallor of a cooling copse.

The night skies, on the other hand, are something different entirely. They are cold and dark. Welcoming like the endless waves of the sea. He could lose himself, happily, in the darkness. He breathes it in gladly. Like the ocean closing over his head, like the harsh liquids that pump through his degraded veins. Sometimes, in the darkness, at the very edge of the airfield, he likes to spread his arms wide to embrace the night. Sometimes, when nobody is watching, he recalls the steps of a fashionable dance on a New Year’s Eve long ago.

He sings, under his breath, what were once popular tunes, as he does the walk around. He taps his pencil against the desk to the rhythm of a band long silenced. Sometimes, he even thinks he hears, faintly, psychotically, the sound of a visionary’s voice. Mostly he remembers that last grand hurrah. The party to end all parties. He doesn’t really recall much more beyond that, and if he does, it is not pleasant. He remembers, fingers twitching spasmodically, clawing at a mask that was melting into his face. He remembers screaming, falling, burning.

When the memories become too much, he covers his face with his hands, a pantomime of shielding himself from the horror. The sound of shattering glass and broken mirrors resounds so loudly in his memory that he starts to fear that it is real. Then, strangely, brazenly, _wrongly_ , salvation comes in the horrific stench of chemical hormones, in the creak of flesh overlaid by metal. A large hand in his line of vision, a low rumbling that shouldn’t really be called a voice at all. His hands contort, eager to sink talons into any approximation of flesh they can get to.

“Martin! Martin, goddamn it!”

Douglas has hold of his wrists. Douglas, whose voice, even now, exhibits a touch of that booming resonance, that harks back to the endless waves.

“I was…”  
“Remembering. I know.”

They all remember no matter how long ago it becomes. It has been around fifty years now and still the memories do not fade. He wouldn’t want them to. Even if, of the four of them, his memories are probably the least coherent. He has spent the last fifty years learning the surface, learning the mechanical dream of flight, learning to be some approximation of sane. He supposes that he couldn’t have been sane to begin with but it’s hard to tell. He was, he supposes, if it is a genuine memory at all, once upon a time, a great actor. A classically trained thespian of the finest order. He still has all the poise and intonation once drilled into him, when he remembers it.

“Look, just… get yourself together, alright? They’ll be here any minute now.”  
“Is my face on straight?”

Douglas holds him still a moment longer, before nodding abruptly, if not a little sadly, as he lets go. Sometimes Martin wonders what Douglas must see for him to appear so mournful. Surely Douglas of all people much see a regular, human, face as normal? Except, he doesn’t seem to and always seems to view that makeshift patchwork as a mask that hides Martin’s true face. Arthur doesn’t care, nor does Carolyn. Douglas is the only one who sees sagging flesh, melting from bone, exposed muscle and atrophying tissue as a thing of beauty. Martin supposes, if he remembers correctly, that one upon a time he’d thought his face an abomination. He’s used to it now and instead finds the patched up, pulled together ends of skin and bone strange to look at.

The plasmids hold his face together these days. It’s a bizarre side effect that has both destroyed his features and, temporarily, will fix them. He uses plasmids on a regular basis to both hide himself as well as for their intended purposes. Just about the only reason that GERTI flies anymore is the use of electrical charges. They make sure that she holds enough residual charge for the engineers who’ll work on her but, if not for the plasmids, her systems would have failed long ago. If not for the pungent pheromones of a creature lacking a diving suit they’d have lost everything anyway. It always amuses Martin to taste the acrid tang in the air around him when that particular change occurs. When Douglas’ voice drops so low that it echoes the terrible booming of other horrors like him.

Still, for all his use in intimidation, it needs a splicer’s touch to measure the electrical discharge consistently and carefully for the duration of a flight. Of course Douglas _can_ fly GERTI if necessary, but he lacks the finesse of the addicted. Martin delights in the measured flow of current from his fingertips across the console. He can feel, in minute, exquisite, agonies, the slow drain of plasmid compound from his veins. He knows when to recharge, when to rest, when to lie back, insensible, in his chair, while Douglas pilots the plane, as it feeds of his energy. Only an addict has the necessary understanding of the finer details of such all consuming torture. Modern addictions would pale in the face of such potent distillations of desire.

“We’ll be in New York for at least two nights, you know.”  
“I know. I really don’t want to have to carry- well, so many things. Would you mind if I…?”

The smell of artificial pheromone swamps the portacabin. It fills Martin’s nostrils with a heavy, sharp, almost metallic, scent until he’s certain he’ll choke on it.

“A whole day without plasmids? Do you think you’ll be able to cope?”

Douglas’ leer doesn’t sit quite right on his face, at least to Martin’s perception. Though perhaps, he’s just expecting to see something else, when he blinks rapidly, in an attempt to see clearly again.

“You’ll just have to hold me down if I start screaming.”

The pain of chemicals draining from his body is beautifully sharp, almost as pleasurable as indulging his addiction, so what a re-engineered Big Daddy does to him, while he’s blacked out, is entirely beside the point.


	2. Big Daddy

Unlike Martin, whose memory is precarious at best, Douglas remembers all of it. He remembers being one of the first, actively volunteering for the transformation. Even though there was no going back. He’d gone to Rapture with a wife, and had buried three by the time he was done. Oddly, he could have lived with that, three deaths behind him, if not for the fourth, the last that broke him. Somehow the gene tonics couldn’t fix anything when he’d needed them to, and by then he wasn’t nearly wealth enough anymore to fund additional research. He’d tried everything of course, had even, desperately, agreed to allow his daughter to be a test subject for that blasted Tenenbaum’s research. She’d died on the operating table.

After that, he’d had nothing to live for. Smuggling contraband from the surface had long ago lost its lustre. He’d prided himself on his business sense once upon a time. He’d been an entrepreneur so he’d argued. He wasn’t a criminal. He’d been providing a service to the public, a very willing, moneyed public, with an interest in the goods he could provide. He’d even, at the height of his career, once worked with Frank Fontaine. A man who’d called him a ‘sophisticated thug’ in that mocking camaraderie familiar to all such independent businessmen. As he recalls, he’d tried to, drunkenly, explain that it _was_ mere business and that he wasn’t a criminal at all. He does at least recall making the argument that, on the surface, even the policemen wore trilbies.

He’d been, admittedly, an alcoholic but then so had everyone in those days. At least two of his wives had died because of it in the end. Nobody had thought to check of course, nobody cared about their livers or lungs. There were genetic fixes aplenty. The only problem being that you had to know about it, solution and cause, before it all went wrong. Julia had passed out drunk on the bedroom floor, he’d only got as far as the entrance hallway that night and she’d been dead the next morning. It had been a shock, had put the first grey into his hair, and then he’d married again. Rebecca had survived a little longer, long enough to give birth to a daughter with a congenital heart defect. Long enough to die from an overdose of the latest recreational drug and alcohol combination. Helena had been the last. She’d spent what was left of his money on treatments from Doctor Steinman. Corrections and re-corrections and changes and additions that had, in their multitude, eventually killed her. The unrestricted, indulgent, commerce of Rapture had managed to kill them all.

Steinman had been responsible for his meeting Martin. A boy sold to a research program, put under the knife of a man determined to make humans perfect. Funnily enough, that brief, first meeting stayed with him. The image of a lanky child, almost a man, with his face covered in bandages. A simple boy, probably half-witted, which would explain why he’d been sold off. Everybody knew that Martin Crieff owned a major share in the city’s electrical power grid: very few probably knew that he had a third child at all.

“Are you… collecting?”  
“What on earth do you mean?”  
“Protection money. That’s what people like you do, isn’t it?”  
“No, son. I’m not that kind of… businessman.”  
“Then what do you do?”  
“I procure things, things that people want.”  
“From the surface?”  
“Something like that.”  
“Have you been up there?”  
“No, not for a very long time.”  
“I’d like to see it. The nurses say that I wouldn’t like it though. That there’s miles and miles of nothing, and it’s all bright blue. So bright that it hurts your eyes.”

It had taken him a while to realise that the boy had been talking about the sky. And the next time they’d met the only familiar aspect were those pale, mournful, eyes. By then, grief and alcohol had taken most of his wits and his business anyway. He hadn’t been a major player anymore but, somehow, he’d wanted to make himself at least useful. He’d volunteered for the program, for the thankless duty of protecting those little girls, just as he had wished to protect is now, long gone, daughter. He’d been the easiest to work with, they’d said, the most affable, even when they started trying to fit him for a diving suit. Even when he knew there’d be no going back.

If not for Lady Luck smiling down upon him he’d probably still be there now, grafted into high pressurised metal, chasing away those who would harm those poor little girls. They’d made a good start on the process but hadn’t managed nearly all that much by the time things had changed. He didn’t require convincing or confusing to persuade him to carry on, so they’d left him aside, while they’d dealt with more troublesome subjects. He’d been half in and half out of his suit, with a voice only slightly deepened, and a protective instinct enhanced by a specific pheromone trail, when he’d come to the surface.

On the surface, Arthur had taken care of the suit and skin grafts, with the efficiency of a scientist gone mad with industry, and, somehow, he has also managed to deaden Douglas’ senses in the process. Gone is the soft scent that clung to Carolyn once upon a time and he supposes that it must change as the little ones grow up. Which doesn’t explain why it is now a demented splicer who provokes all of Douglas’ protective instincts. When Martin sleeps, exhausted from his addiction, it is the simple press of skin to skin that calms Douglas’ senses. When he enfolds Martin with is long limbs, then and only then, does he find the peace that he was searching for. It is too much of a blessing for Douglas to dare question.


	3. Little Sister

For all that she has left the sea behind there are some things that she, deliberately, still holds to. The principles of industry are always of use. Her parents had taught her that. They had been true industrialists, engineers both, with a keen sense of commercial opportunism. From them she has learnt that the principles of supply and demand have no regard for human worth. Sympathy, empathy, have their places in the great game but business only ever makes passing gestures at that sort of thing. Empathy, after all, would have her sympathising with Douglas’ condition, with the yearning in his dark eyes, the automatic compulsion to protect. Carolyn has no need for a broken version of the dear, dead, Mr Bubbles that she remembers, lumbering after her all the time. Thankfully, her keen business sense produces a solution almost instantaneously. She will rid herself of the inconvenience, not of a hulking ocean floor terror, but of his attachment to her. There are ways and means, somewhere in Arthur’s deranged, sing-song, rambling, and the very expediency of the necessity itself practically requires that she make use of them.

The trade is easy. She’s never done a finer deal, and all without the customary subterfuge and lies. Martin understands what he is accepting and, in fact, opinions that their business transaction will be predominantly to his benefit.

“There are times I can’t remember. I could do with someone to… watch over me.”  
“You do realise- No, doesn’t matter. I have no liability once we’re done.”  
“This is Rapture. You’re under no obligation to even tell me the truth if I can’t guess it already.”  
“We’re not _there_ anymore but yes, the principle stands. Do you agree?”  
“More plasmids than I’ll ever know what to do with? You could ask me to murder him with his own drill for that price.”

The process isn’t without risk. They have no example to rely on, no empirical evidence whatsoever that the trade will work at all, but it does. Somehow, Arthur’s mad experiments pay off. The artificial enzymes are drained from her entirely, a painful process, not unlike bone marrow extraction, and transplanted. Attempting to destroy the enzymes might be hazardous, so Arthur maintains, and he seems loathed to even try to negate the end result of so much scientific research. Even with their removal, and various, other, chemical injections to flush any remaining traces from Carolyn’s body, there’s no telling how the enzymes will truly react in their new home. For all Carolyn knows, Martin has signed his own death warrant, a possibility which, the promise of payment seems to have obliterated from his mind. Yet, despite all odds, the enzymes take hold, rapidly populating Martin’s body, and continuing on with their function, producing a scent that will bind Douglas to Martin utterly.

Carolyn isn’t at all surprised that Martin agreed in the first place. Even without the plasmids as barter, she recalls a man who took risks, a gambler who played simply for the thrill of the game. She forgets the name he used then, a stage name, strange and exotic, well suited to an actor. She had been a little girl back then, she’d only really heard fragments of his tale, whispered, by her parents and their friends. He hadn’t been Martin Crieff back then because, of course, Martin Crieff was actually somebody else. She recalls a dangerous smile, cold, empty eyes, hair bleached or dyed as his roles had required. He’d been very popular though talked of more for his escapades than his acting. What she can remember definitively is only that he was implicated in four deaths, only one being outright murder. He’d been rumoured to have been Martin Crieff’s lover, the reason that the electricity magnate was suspected of murdering his own wife, just as he’d been suspected of, somehow, being involved in the suicide of both Crieff siblings, and then, later, of murdering Crieff himself.

Rapture had been full of such pointless intrigues. They hadn’t interested Carolyn then any more than they do now. It is, of course, quite likely that in Martin’s case at least, the rumours were quite true. That for some reason, known only to himself, and certainly not likely to be apparent anymore in the ruins of his psyche, he had decided to do away with an entire family. The adamant declaration of his name suggests that the reason might have been far more complex that anything that the city gossips could have suggested, but, so long as she can be certain he won’t take it upon himself to murder anyone else for the time being, at least not to her inconvenience, the details hardly matter to anyone. Somewhere, buried deep in what’s left of Martin’s brain, is a vicious streak a mile wide, a chilling precision and deviousness that will reap dividends when correctly directed to Carolyn’s commercial cause.

Her parents have taught her well. She remembers clearly the day they moved from Olympus Heights to that glorified maintenance junction. She remembers her parents’ faces, drawn and despairing, when at last they took her to the orphanage, with the promise of a better life. After that her memories are hazy. She doesn’t actually recall being at the orphanage at all, nor does she remember much after, other than the round, friendly, face of Mr Bubbles, filled with so many welcoming lights. This last recollection is why Douglas’ very face offends her. She had been drawn to him, instinctively, so it had been horrifying to always move closer and then find herself looking up into a mere human face. Thankfully, the enzyme extraction has taken care of that problem. She can watch Douglas lumber slowly after Martin without so much as an inclining that she should follow. She can ignore his low drone and, rather more conveniently, no longer feels the urge to throw her arms around his neck in delight when he stoops to do anything.

She has gathered her resources as best she can and arranged them to her purpose. These are the only materials she expected to work with after all. Never had she guessed that Arthur might have a chance to put his own experimental procedure to work on the surface. It will not, of course, be a true pair-bonding. She has no interest in the mindless over-protectiveness that Douglas now showers on Martin, nor would a two-way attraction work in her favour. She merely finds Herc useful to her and would like to keep him close. She doesn’t need more than that from their pairing. His dogged, but curiously mild-mannered, devotion is all the result that she desires. There will be no further modifications. He does not lumber after her or boom in a distorted voice, and since she has only ever employed a small chemical alteration, to each of them to facilitate her aim, it really means nothing when she throws her arms around his neck, delightedly, when he bends to kiss her.


	4. Visionary

He’s not inaccurate when he calls Carolyn ‘mum’ regardless of what she thinks. Carolyn is, genetically speaking, his mother. Sea slug and all. Said slug and the chemicals that went with it probably being most responsible for his demeanour after all. He does indulge in splicing, thought not nearly as often as Martin, which is enough for Carolyn to place the blame on that instead. It’s more convenient to suggest that it’s the long-term result of habit than suppose that it could be anything else. He’s not going to correct her anyway. It’s easier this way, to pretend that he’s just overindulged, rather than explain that he can see the glowing lights that surround Martin’s body, or, suspiciously of late, Douglas’, or, even Herc’s.

His unique abilities are helpful anyway. He can tell when Martin needs a top up, when Douglas needs something to calm him down, when Herc finds himself wanting something that he can’t yet understand. If only they’d utilised his abilities back there, in that great city under the sea. He could have helped things along, chivvied the slow ones up, provided comfort for the downhearted, even, should it have been required, granted a quick and painless death when necessary. He could have done so much down there. It would have all been so wonderful. A city lit up with such bright lights. Instead, he’d done little more than churn out a production line of plasmids because Suchong had such limited vision it was a bore to even think of him at all.

Most people had a fairly limited imagination but somehow down _there_ it had been so much more of an affront. A city of blinding lights full of the world’s most dull people. Production line Little Sisters, factory produced Big Daddies, and lauded over them: dull, boring, humanity. He’d more or less given up on anything making any sense when he’d met Martin for the first time. It had been some ridiculous charity gala event, which meant that it was yet another parade of propaganda, and Arthur had been sent because Suchong had better things to do with his time than attend in person. It had been so dull that he’d wondered if he couldn’t just make up a stomach upset and pretend that he’d had some bad shellfish to get away. And then, just as he’d been shucking oysters to lend credence to his excuse, there, fashionably late, spliced up to his eyeballs, and commanding the attention of the room, was Martin. There had been his goal, a splicer who burned so brightly that he was blinding in his brilliance.

Minor scientist or otherwise, Arthur had, even then, been alarmingly persistent and by the end of the evening they’d been dancing together to Bei Mir Bist Du Schon, appropriately enough. The next morning Arthur had woken up on the floor, lying on Martin’s fur coat, while the other sat next to him, already indulging in the first hit of the day. Theirs had been a successful partnership, on the surface it might even have passed for a relationship, if not for the slightly commercial aspect of the attraction. Martin had needed a scientist to create a very specific biological contaminate for him, something that would react adversely with the electrical plasmids that a certain family favoured. Arthur had been drawn towards Martin’s addiction and the blinding, terrible, light that came with it. Of course Arthur had created the chemical for him, even if that should have meant the end of their commercial transaction. Yet, business concluded, they’d had the occasional fling afterwards, increasing in frequency, as Arthur had planned, as he refined plasmid after plasmid for Martin’s personal use. Addiction had been all that he’d really needed to reel Martin in.

Back then he’d heard of Douglas, of course, the deranged mobster who’d gone quietly insane and actually wanted to be grafted into a diving suit. He’d struck Arthur as somebody he really didn’t want to meet. Nobody who carried a Tommy gun as casually as he carried his cigars was a sensible person to be around, pacifying insanity or otherwise. Unfortunately, with the demise of Suchong, regardless of his protests, Arthur had been contracted to actually help with the grafting process. He hadn’t met Douglas then but he’d seen him. A tall, heavy-set, man who looked like he could have taken on the role without any extra modifications. Seen through the thick glass of an observation room, Arthur had been struck by just how harmlessly affable the man could make himself appear. A man who’d been blasé about gunning down a dozen or so dock workers for skimming a little off his shipments ought not to appear so mild. It was a thought Arthur had held on to. After all, a threat who didn’t appear threatening at a first glance might have far more currency than one you could see coming a mile off.

In the end, it had all come together fairly seamlessly, Arthur’s plan to escape the drowning city beneath the waves. Granted, he hadn’t expected Martin to go _completely_ insane in the process, or for Carolyn to refuse to leave Douglas behind, but it has all worked out in the end. Carolyn has grown up into a fine businesswoman, Martin has conveniently forgotten almost everything other than that last New Year’s Eve party and Douglas is so consumed by protective instincts that require an outlet that he’s hardly going to suspect anything at all. And if, over the years, Arthur has grown just as fond of Douglas as he is of Martin or Carolyn, then that’s no matter. They are his family now. He would do anything for them.

Safe, away from the sea, he is free to let his experiments flourish. There is nobody to rein him in or to challenge the logic of his vision. He even has a new test subject and Carolyn has all but given her consent to his experimentation. She is as happy as the orphanage always promised she would be. Martin is well looked after, his addiction perfectly fed by Arthur’s new and improved plasmids. Even Douglas’ strange compulsion to both protect and, at the same time, break the law is nurtured successfully. This is far more truthfully the expression of the Rapture dream. The ideal society where the artist need fear no censor, where the scientist is no longer bound by petty morality, where the great need not be constrained by the small. This has been, all along, the truth that Arthur has been seeking, the vision he was born to realise. Any doubts are readily swept away by what he has already accomplished, his perfect family reflecting a mere glimpse of greater things to come.


End file.
